Hacketts Book is hardly a techno thiller
No it's a techno-thriller, as was
Red Storm Rising and
Red Army. Hackett has the advantage over Clancy in
in many cases NATO was actually better OTL than he had envisenged in his ATL 'buffed' NATO.
Not really
Everything that has happened since has convinced me that the Red Army might have been larger than NATO but its troops and NCOs were for the most part poorly trained and very wooden relative to those in NATO so this quantitative advantage would not have been as decisive as you believe.
The stereotyped description of the Red Army that bears little relation to the reality... well, until the latter half of the decade when training standards went into free-fall.
The late 70s was a period of decay for Russia
Economically speaking, yes. But the impact of the economic decay did not become debilitating on the Soviet Military until the mid-80's.
and the Afganistan war in the 80s had cost it dearly as well as destroying the morale of the Red Army.
Afghanistan was conducted largely with second-rate troops in an environment where Soviet doctrine did not work well and were deliberately under-resourced to boot. It is illuminating that the Soviets spent more money on the Soviet Group of Forces Germany in 1983 then they did
And its equipment largely a generation behind the West in terms of Quality at this time.
Erm, no. At the start of the 1980's, it was on the level (and in some cases superior) to NATO tech. By the late-1980's, it had fallen behind but was still eminently competitive: a T-80B is still perfectly capable of killing a M1A1 at standard combat ranges. Assuming it hadn't broken down because of collapsing maintenance standards.
As you say Tactical Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Weapons would have been used from the start and this was always reflected in all levels of NATO forces training - they expected to fight and survive in an NBC environment.
Maybe not the start, but really this applies to both sides. The Soviets extensively prepared themselves for a NBC environment because they had assumed in the 50's and 60's that the entire war would be nuclear from the start. In the 70's and 80's they moved to a more flexible view but kept
Of course, even many NATO officers admitted that in a nuclear environment their forces (as well as the Soviets) would rapidly be rendered combat ineffective by the sheer amount of firepower being tossed around. When a formation takes 90+% casualties in the course of an hour, the survivors very quickly become more concerned with... well, survival then with prosecuting the war.
And of course, once the tactical nukes are being flung about there is no barrier to the all-out strategic exchange.
WHoever wins air superiority (which is apparently not a given) essentially will win the war,
No, whoever wins in Europe essentially wins the war.
Airpower needs breathing space to be really effective. Allied airpower in Normandy in 1944 pinned the Germans down, but it did so at the end of a long campaign spanning years to pound German industry, cripple their transportation networks, and destroy their air force. When the rebuilt Red Air Force clashed with the Luftwaffe over Kursk, the air battles were titanic, but the two air forces largely canceled each other out. As a result, neither side's air power played much of a part in the decisive ground battles. In this scenario, both sides would start with vast, experienced, and effective air forces and air defense networks. There would have been no long campaign before the initial land war in which the air forces could slowly soften up the defences, and whittle away the threat - it would have been an immediate dive into a colossal air battle. This favors the side with the more powerful ground force... which is the Red Army.
This is the whole reason behind that old Cold War joke of a group of Soviet generals meeting in Paris and one of them asking, "By the way, Sergei, who won the air war?"
Whatever war breaks out, the USA with its B52s and such is better prepared for a long slog that will bomb away Russian production.
...
Yeah. Conventional strategic bombing working. With a few hundred bombers. Flying into the teeth of air defenses and interceptors that make Hanoi look like Central Park and which the Germans, even adjusted for the difference in technology, could only dream of. With zero prospect for fighter escort or SEAD support. I can see this working
real well.